


Redshift

by bloodbright



Series: Mass Effect works [2]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Far Future, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-29
Updated: 2016-06-29
Packaged: 2018-07-18 22:07:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7332496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodbright/pseuds/bloodbright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the war, the survivors moved on. They debated plaques and medals and memorials; they named new children and new ships, built new cities and new stations, renewed old enmities and made new alliances.</p><p>A very long time has passed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Redshift

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [tumblr](http://bloodbright.tumblr.com/post/137840220626/hello-my-friend-long-time-no-see-are-you) for the prompt "xeranthemum - eternity, immortality."

After the war, the survivors moved on. They debated plaques and medals and memorials; they named new children and new ships, built new cities and new stations, renewed old enmities and made new alliances.

A very long time has passed.

Around one derelict star orbits an abandoned station. It was called the Citadel, once, the grandest station any race newly venturing among the stars had ever seen; now it could fit many times over into the stations that circle Tarazed and Gianfar, Lesath and Sterope II, and others besides.

Its corridors lie empty now, silent and still except for the quiet occasional skitter of legs—the keepers, still diligent and tireless on their unending rounds.

They’ve had a very long time to work. The bodies went first: stripped bare and flung into the protein vats, broken down to their raw materials to make more keepers to carry away more bodies. Then the detritus: the broken glass, the fallen beams, the useless weapons.

When that had been done, the Citadel gleamed again, ready to welcome back shopkeeper and soldier, tourist and diplomat, all the seething mass of life that once swarmed through its halls and docks and wards. But the keepers weren’t finished yet.

They’ve cleared away every trace of habitation: stripped bare the glass-walled condos from which the wealthy looked down and the tiny capsules where the transient spent the night, removed all the merchandise in the stores and broken down their signs, taken down the photos and pleas posted in the bays where refugees waited to learn what more they would lose.

There isn’t a trace left to say that the asari found this place, that the turians and salarians joined them, and the krogan and hanar, volus and drell too; that before them there were the Protheans, and the densorin and the oravores, the inusannon and the thoi’han, and before them other races long lost to the harvest.

No dust will settle here. The keepers move restlessly through the station under their care like a conscientious landlord making things ready for the next tenant, a mother waiting for her child to come home.

#

But one thing does remain. In one bay in one dock in the ring at the center of the station, a little disk lies on the ground.

The keepers have maintained it, all these years; who knows what they understand, or how much? Perhaps they have inherited the fascinations and preoccupations of their makers. Perhaps they remember their makers’ destroyer and are taking their wordless revenge.

So: there is a little disk that is in fact a projector, and what it projects is the image of a human woman: her back straight, her face scarred, her shoulders surprisingly thin out of their armor.

“Commander Shepard,” it says into the darkness. “Alliance Navy.” No one in the galaxy has said those names in years beyond counting.

“I find the best advanced battle strategy is to have more bullets than the other guy,” it says. No one uses projectiles any more; they moved on long ago to energy-based weapons.

“You want help solving your problems? Get me out of this damn demo mode,” it says. No one hears.

Less than a ghost and no memorial, this thing that remains, this mindless abomination repeating its canned lines into a cold eternity; until, perhaps, the power cores that have burned for a billion years finally give out and the ancient station settles silently into the changeless chill of space.

#

The statues crumbled long ago, and even before that her name had ceased to be spoken; the sound of it different in the mouths of each succeeding generation, until at last it had changed beyond recognition.

No matter. This is her monument: every war and every peace, every sprawling city and far-flung colony, every kindness and every cruelty done by a living creature in a galaxy made free an epoch ago.


End file.
